Tag Archives: drawing

I realized I don’t like writing blog posts because I find them tedious, but it’s a necessary evil.

I’ve been trying to get myself to finish more things, even if I don’t like the way they’re going, to try and improve my coloring techniques. I love coloring, I just don’t do it enough.

I wanted to color this without overthinking it, adding way too much shadows or working the colors until they got muddy and irreparable – which are some of the carnal sins I’ve committed when coloring in the past.

This was inked with prismacolor pens and colored with copic markers and prismacolor pencils.

And in case you were wondering, that’s a girl. Female characters don’t always have to make pretty faces, have their boobies hanging out or be contorted in ways that the viewer can see all their girly parts at once.

This year, I’m making it my business to step up the portfolio game and try to get more commissions/freelance work. I still love drawing more than making jewelry, hence, wanting to get more drawing jobs.

Last year, I kinda beat myself up over doing “pretty, detailed, predictable stuff”, I second guessed myself a lot and held myself back for no reason at all. I like doing pretty, detailed, predictable stuff and even if it’s predictable, I should still do it. I’m pretty sure the only person who’s judging me is me anyway.

I’m in the process of inking this and it’ll be colored with watercolor. I want to do more digital work, as my traditional stuff doesn’t scan very well but I can’t help it. I still love traditional media even though it looks awful on a computer screen ;__;

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The first drawing is from March 2013. The second drawing is from today (September 27, 2014). I’ve learned a lot since then. I always wanted to color the original, but I never liked the way it was drawn. Fortunately, I’ve been on a drawing spree and I was in the mood to redo this.

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This is where I get to sit in my little corner of the internet and talk about my feelings.

I’ve went through a long period of time where I refused to do digital art because it never looked the way I wanted it to. Back in 2004, I was happy with my digital work up until about 2008, when I decided to switch to traditional media. Traditional media always felt more ‘free’ to me because I wasn’t limited to the functions of a program and my lack of how to make said functions work for me.

Towards the end of 2012, I decided to invest in a (refurbished) tablet PC to draw on because I certainly couldn’t afford a cinitq. I still can’t. I bought a Motion Computing LE1700 and while it made digital art a bit easier, I certainly wasn’t happy with the quality of work I was producing versus what I was capable of doing on paper.

I spent a lot of time, sitting around and dissecting other people’s photo-realistic digital paintings and thinking “why can’t I do that?” And then I tried doing that and while the lineless art with smooth shading looked pretty good… it didn’t feel like something I would normally produce.

After a while of giving up on that, a couple of nights ago, I sat around with my tablet and I wanted to do something. I wanted to use loose, sketchy lines because it was a style I always felt comfortable with. Every time I’ve tried to ink digitally, it always looked static and boring. It didn’t look like something I would normally produce. I felt like some sort of poser who didn’t have a trademark style and that was a result of me trying to do what everyone else was doing.

So last night, I gave sketchy lines another try and the final picture from this comparison is the result. I was really happy because it looked like something that I did and it didn’t feel like torture to draw or color it. It had my ‘flavor’ to it because my lines were clearly visible.

This is something I hadn’t realized. Today, it dawned on me that all of my favorite works since I started doing digital involved color thrown over sketchy lines. That style just became more and more refined over time without me even realizing it. It’s crazy that it’s taken me over 10 years to get to this point. It’s also crazy that I’ve stopped myself from doing what I was comfortable with all these years because it didn’t look like what all the other artists were doing.

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I… I somehow ended up drawing Sailor Moon last night. I was sketching out a random pose and I thought “hey! this looks like some kinda Sailor Moon pose!” And so I drew Sailor Moon.

It’s worth noting that while I’m note a huge Sailor Moon fan nowadays, she definitely had an impact on my life. If not for her, I probably would have never started drawing as seriously as I did.

I don’t do a lot of fanart nowadays, due to my lack of imagination when doing said fanart. I tend to overthink in the sense that I want to make a carbon copy of the original artist’s style (out of fear that the character might not be recognizable) and I also have trouble coming up with poses.

This happened sort of naturally yesterday and I wish that’d happen more often with fanart. She’s definitely recognizable without being a copy of Takeuchi’s style.

I feel compelled to finish this as Sailor Moon still has a place in my black heart :)